Art Nouveau textiles in the Rubelli ArchiveAt the beginning of the Twentieth century Rubelli was one of the two textile companies that survived the dramatic economic crisis that followed the end of the Serenissima Republic.
While most of the production was still based on the traditional patterns of the golden centuries of Venetian fabrics, a number of textiles distinguished themselves, characterized by intriguingly new patterns strongly influenced by the emerging Art Nouveau style.
Some of them were designed by known artists, such as Raffaele Mainella and, later, Guido Cadorin and Umberto Bellotto, others were inspired by royalty, such as the velvet designed for Queen Margherita; all of them represented a dramatic innovation in the field of textile art, opening new possibilities and prospectives both for artists and textile companies.
The paper will present a selection of the Art Nouveau fabrics, sketches and pointed papers preserved in the Rubelli Archive, most of them never before seen or published, shedding new light on a specific and less-known period of the history of textile arts in Venice.

Maria BOSTENARU DAN, Architect, Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism, Department for History and Theory of Architecture and Heritage Conservation, Bucharest

The beginnings of reinforced concreteAlthough concrete was a new material of Modernism, its form language was looked for during Art Nouveau. This was true for efforts in Italy (Torino), in Belgium (Henri van de Velde) and Hungary (Istvan Medgyaszay). Erich Mendelsohn reflected on the use of concrete in the Einstein tower to the language development for concrete made by Henri van de Velde, as it comes out from his letters. The Einstein tower in Potsdam is considered to express through its shape the adequate form for concrete, but it was mainly done out of brick and iron. Van de Velde saw a connection between the shape used for concrete and that for timber, and this view was not singular. The same saw István Medgyaszay, a student of Otto Wagner, and expressed his views both theoretically and practically, in a lecture in Vienna as well as in the concept of the theatre in Veszprém. We will analyse some works of Medgyaszay in Veszprém and Balatonalmádi, as well as some projects published in Der Architekt, to see the connections between theory and practice.
Apart of the efforts on the philosophy of the material, the real technical employment is worth a look. To the time of Art Nouveau reinforced concrete was employed in the Hennebique system. Examples of this are find in Europe and outside (ex. the Baron palace in Cairo). Relevant for how they need to be conserved is the XX September boulevard in Genova. Another example from the archives are the transformations suffered by the Athenée Palace Hotel in Bucharest, which started as a Hennebique system of Art Nouveau time and was transformed into a modernist building by the architect Duiliu Marcu. In that part of Romania no real Art Nouveau developed, it was rather the style of New-Romanian, and the Hotel did not belong to this. In other parts of Romania where we find employment of the Hennebique system, such as Oradea (the Apollo palace), there was the Secession style, with close connections to the Hungarian architecture. Reinforced concrete, probably in form of Hennebique, is documented also in the archives on the works of Béla Lajta in Budapest, highlighting the play of light and heavy, as it was in Loos’ architecture. Not to forget is the contribution of Joze Plecnik with the first church in reinforced concrete in Vienna, finding an own language which highlights the difference between a hall and a storey-wise construction.

Rehabilitation, functional restoration and renovation of the Civic Aquarium of MilanRegarded as one of the most significant examples of Milan Liberty Architecture, the Civic Aquarium is the only building evidence left by the International Exhibition of 1906.
The building, created on the project of the Architect Sebastiano Locati from Milan, is of great
interest for its original architectural foundation and for its original artificial stones and painted majolicas. Seriously damaged in August 1943 by air bombings, the building was restored in the 1960’, keeping its original function. The result of the preservation and functional requalification lasted in 2006, on the occasion of the original building centenary, is the restoration of the rich decorative array of artificial stones and majolicas and also, by means of an exacting intervention on the building structures, the recovery of internal areas with the creation of broad spaces for the teaching and topic expositions, the radical renew of the expositive side of the pools and the realization of areas aiming at public activities such as a Library, an Auditorium, and Labs.